Hell Freezes: Defending Meghan McCain v. Paul Begala

Democratic strategist and pundit Paul Begala gives Republican Daddy's girl and instapundit Meghan McCain a smackdown on Bill Maher's Real Time that, on the face of it, is deserved (and delicious). Watch the two-minute clip:
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You're not going to hear me say McCain didn't deserve the schooling: she's posing as an expert all over cable news and the web, so she'd damn well better know whereof she speaks, and in this case clearly doesn't. To cover her rear, she hits Begala below the belt by playing the "I'm young and you're old" card, fully justifying the spanking Begala gives her backside.

But. Begala's response to McCain's ignorance about the Reagan years still makes this history teacher call foul: "I wasn't alive during the French Revolution, but I still know about that."

McCain probably knows a good bit about the French Revolution too. I'm sure she got that in high school, maybe even college. Schools are great at teaching stuff that happened long before the students' parents were born. But they're dismal at teaching all students -- not just the minority who take a "current events" elective -- about the world of their own, and their parents', generation. (This is old news to those of us who have read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your U.S. History Textbook Got Wrong.)

I'd put money on the fact that Begala learned next to squat, in high school, about the two or three decades preceding his graduation year.

So rather than celebrating the spanking, we should be decrying the curricular reality this little brouhaha points to: we're graduating politically illiterate youths into adulthood.

You've heard of studies like this:

According to a 2006 survey of Americans aged 18 to 24, less than four in ten can identify Iraq on a map of the Middle East; one-third of young Americans cannot calculate time-zone differences; even after Hurricane Katrina, two-thirds cannot find Louisiana on map; almost one-third think that the United States has between 1 and 2 billion, and two in ten, amazingly, cannot point to the Pacific Ocean on a world map.

So sure, as an astute commenter on another blog notes, Meghan McCain might be "the political Paris Hilton: Famous daughter of a rich man and she likes the attention." But worse than that, she's one of our "elite best and brightest" -- you know, the Teach for America talent pool. And by her own admission she knows little about the recent political history of the country her father helps to -- I want to say "serve," but I'm not talking about health insurance and oil corporations here, so I'll choose -- rule.

It's less scary coming from Miss South (or was it "East"?) Carolina. It's full-on disturbing coming from McCain.

And since school history classrooms are every bit as fearful of provoking "partisanship" as it seems our current president is, it's hard to see how this is going to change any time soon. Especially since that president's ed reform seems mostly determined to equate "education" with "workplace readiness," and to hell with citizenship.